The fortunate accidents that can change the course of a life
Taking advantage of some questions submitted to me by El País, Spain’s leading daily, about the chance events that can change the course of our careers, I thought I would give my Medium readers an idea of who I am and why I do what I do.
Had it not been for a series of fortunate accidents I almost certainly wouldn’t have become an academic 26 years ago. Teaching, living in Madrid, and focusing on technology were never part of my plans: after graduating, the last thing I wanted to do was become a teacher, it seemed the most boring profession I could imagine :-)
My advice for anybody in their twenties who thinks that they’re going to control every step of their career is to think again. Quite simply, it isn’t possible, it’s not a good idea anyway, and will likely drive you mad in the process.
Perhaps the three key factors that led to me becoming an academic was winning the Christmas lottery, my father’s unexplained decision to give me a computer at a time when nobody had one, along with a teacher of mine who was determined I should take up his profession. If you’d asked me in my final year at university what I intended to do after graduating, I would told you I wanted to do an MBA, raise some money and get a loan to start a fish farm in my native Galicia, up in the northwest of Spain, and spend the rest of my days fattening turbots. Instead, and as a result of the totally unexpected events mentioned above, today I am a lecturer in Innovation and Technology at one of the best business schools in the world, and every day, thousands of people around the world read my analyses about the impact of technology on our lives. So if you ask me what impact chance can have on a career, I would say, a great deal, if not everything.
You can plan as much as you like, but things will never go according to plan. Keeping so many variables under control is pretty much impossible, while sticking to decisions made under different circumstances is only going to tie you down and limit your options. New opportunities will also present themselves and you’ll meet new people, so in my opinion it makes more sense to be open minded about change?
Then there is the question of big data, which is giving us access to information about us that we could never have imagined. When it comes to our careers, we need to bear in mind the outcome of tests, exams, interviews and combinations of factors that will undoubtedly affect us. Big data could mean that some of this information is affected by other variables that we otherwise wouldn’t be able to include, but the results of analyzing data will continue to surprise us. It won’t be long before artificial intelligence will be able to offer outputs on the basis of inputs that we poor humans will not be able to understand, generating algorithms our minds could never imagine. And if that doesn’t come up with a few surprises, then I don’t know what will.
Our actions obviously influence our future by offering us more or less freedom of action, but there will always be more factors in the equation that we cannot predict. Determinism is a losing game and will always disappoint and frustrate us.
As Jawaharlal Nehru noted: life is like a game of cards. The hand you are dealt is determinism; the way you play it is free will.
(En español, aquí)
